Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 90

How To Predict The Non-Obvious Future

I have spent a lot of time over the past few months thinking about the future.

I passed the two year mark of starting my own business. I just turned forty years old. Those alone are plenty of cause to get you thinking about things on a different time scale. When you add to that my annual tradition of looking backward over the past year in order to produce my “Non-Obvious Trend Report” … you can see how I end up spending a lot of time focused on the future.

The annual result of this obsession ha...

Best and Worst Of Superbowl 2015 Marketing Strategy

There are a surprising number of people who believe that I don’t like puppies.

Every year the day after the Super Bowl when the votes are tallied rating all the ads, the ads with puppies always mainstream favorites. Meanwhile, for the past four years I have published my own list of winners and losers based on marketing strategy versus entertainment value and one thing has become sadly clear:

Puppies in ads are rarely the sign of a great marketing strategy.

This year’s game was no different, with...

The One CES 2015 Trend Marketers Should Care About

If there is one thing that is dramatically clear from this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it is that the future is definitely not about mobile. Or smart televisions. Or super slim digital cameras.

Instead of these mainstream consumer gadgets, the products getting attention this week are wildly diverse … from wifi enabled “smart kettles” to “selfie hair brushes” to mood tracking wrist straps. Amidst the silliness of sometimes overly quirky products, though, is a quantifiable con...

The 2014 Influential Business Book Shortlist

It is the end of the year and a time to look back upon a full year of ideas and try to take stock of what the biggest ideas and insights were. For the past several months, I have been curating my annual Non-Obvious Trend Report and spending time amidst speaking and traveling to put together my latest thoughts on the trends that will matter in 2015.

As I start to put the finishing touches on the book, one of the nicest side benefits is I get a chance to go back through all the books I encounter...

Black Friday And The Rise Of Retail Prostitution

Imagine we lived in a world where love didn’t exist.

Every day would be filled with people moving from interaction to interaction – only investing in each one out of convenience or necessity. In this lonely existence, any relationship would be a short term diversion. People would detach themselves and their emotions from one another. Without love, loyalty wouldn’t be possible.

Thankfully, none of us live in that world. We have love and relationships and family and humanity. Except on Black Frid...

Why Facebook’s War On Marketing Is A Good Thing

Facebook has brands worried … again.

A recent article headline from Ad Age magazine summed up this concern perfectly, announcing that “Facebook Cuts Brands’ Reach Once Again.”

Of course they did.

One of the biggest issues facing the largest social media platforms today is how to monetize their offerings. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are all working on a solution to this same challenge, and it has marketers justifiably worried. What will they start charging for? And how will they ransom the data...

Why Brands Should Stop Idolizing Oreo’s Social Media Strategy

Today is great timing for a Halloween promotion.

Everyone is talking about costumes, candies and spooky stuff as they prepare for the rare treat of a Friday evening Halloween. If you happened to visit Oreo on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter today, you would see what seems like another piece of social media brilliance from the brand: #OreoLab. After all, who wouldn’t want to see America’s favourite cookie transformed into a “nomster” through a cute stop motion Instagram video?

It is quirky and...

How To Be More Influential

A leader is someone you can follow without feeling like a follower.

There was a time when I spent almost every part of my day studying leadership. Before I found my passion in marketing, I used to explore what it took to be a great leader by constantly reading expected and unexpected sources on the subject. Along the path to getting a Masters degree in English more than a decade ago, I wrote a paper about the evolution of leadership in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Later, I compared lessons from the...

The One Thing Every Brand Needs To Build Trust

Despite what advertising tells you, supermodels don’t generally eat mile-high bacon burgers.

Yet this is exactly the type of fabricated reality we have come to expect from marketing. Often celebrities are hired as spokespeople for products they would clearly never use in real life. Actors in stock photos portray overly airbrushed people faking handshakes while billboards proclaim out of touch messages like “Hotness comes in all shapes and sizes” … as long as that size happens to be less than a...

5 Unexpected Storytelling Lessons From Beth Comstock

I heard the same story three times in a row yesterday, and it was illuminating.

Every year outside the well scripted confines of Manhattan an epic event called The Future of Storytelling brings together designers, technologists, builders and brand marketers to ask the most fundamental question facing any creator: how do you tell a story that people will care about? This year’s event gathered spoken word poets, a master perfumer, a world renowned magician and many other unexpected characters to...